My research sits at the intersection of digital technology, politics, and anthropology, with a core focus on the dynamic relationship between technology and democracy. I study digital activism, hacker culture, data politics, disinformation, and posthuman warfare, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan that combines online and offline methods. Through this work, I examine how politics is mediated and translated through digital infrastructures, and how human and non-human assemblages respond to the rise of a digital Leviathan.
My monograph, The Nobody Movement: Hackers, Netizens, and the Data Activism of g0v (2025, in Chinese), analyzes Taiwan’s civic tech community g0v (gov-zero) and its role in mediating public participation through technological infrastructures. Building on this research, I explore how ideas of “openness”—from open source to open data and open government—are imagined, translated, and contested in contemporary Taiwan, and how these translations generate new political possibilities as well as unintended consequences.
More recently, my work has focused on disinformation through the project “Forwarded Care: Affect, Love, and Relations in the Rumorscape.” Rather than treating rumors solely as threats, I foreground care to analyze rumor circulation as a relational and affective practice, examining how civic actors mobilize care to counter disinformation and rebuild social connections.
My current project, “Cyborg Frontlines,” examines posthuman warfare in Taiwan, including drones, information manipulation, cyberattacks, and undersea cable sabotage, and investigates how these grey-zone operations reshape everyday life, security, and democratic resilience. In parallel, I founded the Cyborg Resilience Co-lab (CRC), a research × technology × art platform dedicated to experimenting with alternative forms of digital resilience at the intersection of war, disaster, and technological risk.
More about CRC: https://crcolab.art/